In a story early in the week, Matthews profiled the successful tenure of the superintendents of the two largest schools districts in the Washington, DC metropolitan area: Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland. The majority of the article was a balanced
PORTLAND, Ore. - Oregon educators Wednesday night shared their concerns with the top man in the federal Department of Education. From "No Child Left Behind" to the proliferation of for-profit online and charter schools and the impact of state and federal budget cuts, the crowd had plenty to say to Education Secretary Arne Duncan at his "teacher town hall."
Duncan was invited to Portland as a keynote speaker for the Oregon Business Association. During his visit, he asked for time to talk with educators, to hear their views about how federal education policy and reforms are affecting them.
Suzanne Cohen, a seventh-grade math and science teacher in Portland, isn't convinced that federal regulations always are the best fit for Oregon classrooms.
"I think what's happening is we're seeing more and more federal policies that
Last Wedenesday students from dozens of campuses across the country participated in walkouts in support of Occupy Wall Street. After a hurried set of discussions over the weekend, organizers of those events called a second day of action for today.
Some 144 colleges in thirty states have announced plans for actions on theOccupy Colleges website, with more than fifty of them providing links to their protests’ Facebook pages. This may not be, as one widely-circulated prediction called it, “biggest student protest on US soil since 1970,” but it’s looking pretty big.
The official call to action slated 4:30 ET as the kickoff for today’s events, but a number of campuses are planning to start earlier. Check back here for updates as the day rolls on.
School turnaround is about the need to make drastic changes and achieve dramatic improvements in chronically low-performing schools. The approach has been championed by the Obama administration, which over the past three years has awarded $3.5 billion in grants to schools willing to adopt one of four models:
Turnaround: Replace the principal and no less than 50 percent of the staff, and adopt increased learning time and instructional reforms;
Restart: Convert a school to a charter or close and reopen it as a charter or under the management
This post was written by a mother with two daughters who attend high-achieving schools in Montgomery County, Md., one of the best public school districts in the country.
The mom asked that she not be identified so as not to poison her children’s relationships with their teachers. Even though you won’t know who wrote the post, it still tells a story about education today and where school reform is taking us, even in the best schools.
Read full article >>
The Student Labor Action Project, a joint effort of the United States Student Association and Jobs With Justice, has posted a set of OWS reports from student activists at U Mass Amherst, George Washington University, the University of Oregon, the University of Central Florida, and Brandeis.
From the introduction by SLAP coordinator Chris Hicks:
“What the mainstream media has failed to understand is that what the youth, the workers, and the unemployed want is justice. This is a justice that has been denied to many of us in our lifetimes – an idea that we once heard of but have never known. The issues that so many of us fight for can all be traced back to the same small group of people: it’s the corporate lobbyists that have prevented any meaningful change to immigration laws; it has been the corporations that have scaled back workers rights; it has been the corporations that have drowned college graduates in debt. For the first time in my life, we have been able to
Via the State Education Department:
Teacher and Principal Practice Rubrics
* Update - The Approved List of Teacher and Principal Practice Rubrics has been updated with additional providers. We are continuing to work with providers to obtain electronic versions of some of their documentation, so please be sure to check our site periodically for updated information. [Oct. 7. 2011]
Detailed information on approved rubrics is online athttp://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/teachers-leaders/practicerubrics/.
The NYSUT Teacher Practice Rubric was one of the first five approved by SED for use by districts working to implement changes in state law governing teachers' Annual Professional Performance Reviews. More information on the rubric and the TED: Teacher Evaluation and Development system is available at www.nysut.org/ted.
StateImpact Ohio:
Traditional public school districts and charter schools have long been at odds in Ohio, but that strain is most noticeable when it comes to schools run by for-profit corporations.
About six years ago, April Nagorsky was a kindergarten teacher at the International Preparatory charter school on Cleveland's East Side. Then, one day, she says she came to work and was greeted with a big surprise.
Submitted by Timothy Boyle on October 13, 2011
When I stopped into my home school this summer, I found out I that would indeed have a new position, test-prep teacher. As such my main area of focus would be on teaching the writing skills necessary to complete the open-ended sections of the PSSA. To get my head around this change I decided to return to what had worked for me in the past. I logged on to the PD planner. I
This crisis mentality is in stark contrast to years of survey research showing that Americans generally give high marks to their local schools. Phi Delta Kappa International and Gallup surveys have found that the populace holds their neighborhood schools in high regard; in fact, this year’s survey found that “Americans, and parents in particular, evaluate their community schools more positively than in any year since” the survey started.
How could there be such a disconnect between a national narrative about public education and opinions about local schools? The two contradictory narratives draw on completely different sources of evidence.
Debate about public education on the national level generally draws on evidence from macro-sources of data: scores from standardized testing, reports on the nation’s dropout rates, samplings from various student populations, and comparative assessments in various subject areas. But people get their school news from far more local, personal, and qualitative sources — from hometown newspapers, from local television and radio broadcasts, from neighbors, and
In a post last week over at Flypaper, the Fordham Institute’s Terry Ryan took a “frank look” at the ratings of the handful of Ohio charter schools that Fordham’s Ohio branch manages. He noted that the Fordham schools didn’t make a particularly strong showing, ranking 24th among the state’s 47 charter authorizers in terms of the aggregate “performance index” among the schools it authorizes. Mr. Ryan takes the opportunity to offer a few valid explanations as to why Fordham ranked in the middle of the charter authorizer pack, such as the fact that the state’s “dropout recovery schools,” which accept especially hard-to-serve students who left public schools, aren’t included (which would likely bump up Fordham’s relative ranking).
Mr. Ryan doth protest too little. His primary argument, which he touches on but does not flesh out, should be that Ohio’s performance index is more a measure of student characteristics than of any defensible concept of school effectiveness. By itself, it reveals relatively little about the “quality” of schools operated by Ohio’s charter authorizers.
But the limitations of measures like the performance index, which are discussed below, have implications far
First Posted: 10/13/11 11:09 AM ET Updated: 10/13/11 11:14 AM ET